Vinyl Life

The history of recorded music on phonograph records spans well over a century. But just over a half century ago, beginning in the 1940s, modern vinyl began to take shape and to resemble what we know today. Ortofon also greatly influenced this process by developing and producing a new and improved cutterhead in 1946. This gave way to the era of high fidelity sound reproduction.

The records of the early 1940s were coarse-groove shellacs, and playback was made with both mechanical and electronic “cartridges” using an extremely high tracking force. Many cartridges now used a diamond stylus, and for the records produced in this era, a spherical stylus with a 65µm radius was considered state of the art.